Robert Lepage on Family, Francophone Separatism and ‘887’

Robert Lepage in “887,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Credit
Stephanie Berger

When Robert Lepage was a boy, he played with boxes. Abandoning the toys his parents had saved up all year to buy for him, he’d build cityscapes with the packaging instead. Fifty years on, not a lot has changed. In “887,” his wondrous and wrenching solo show running through next weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Mr. Lepage, 59, acts alongside a giant cube that conjures his shabby Quebec City childhood home, his current chic apartment and other smaller boxes, too. The autobiographical production, presented by his company, Ex Machina, is a meditation on his family, memory and the Francophone separatist movements that unsettled Canada in the 1960s and ’70s.

On Sunday, just before a matinee, Mr. Lepage, who created the recent “Ring” cycle for the Metropolitan Opera and “Kà” for Cirque du Soleil, sat in his dressing room in stocking feet. Sipping a Coke Zero, he softly discussed theatrical intimacy and what he’d like his obituary to say. These are edited and condensed excerpts from the conversation.

When you were writing the show, did you go back to your childhood apartment at 887 Murray Avenue?

It’s still there. The front part looks the same. Not the back part. I remembered it being a huge place, and it was this tiny cramped place. That was a shock. Unfortunately for the residents, I performed [“887”] in Quebec City, not very far from there. People would go and do a pilgrimage, knock on doors. I should never have put in the real address.

Did you make the toys and models in the show yourself?

I design them. Everybody in the show, all of the technical people, come up with suggestions. We start by doing what kids do, taking big refrigerator containers and punching holes and saying this is my house. You prototype in a naïve, playful way.

It’s been a very emotional process, that’s for sure. And a lot of those emotions are not resolved. The biggest surprise was the presence of my father in my life. I always thought I’d inherited more from my mother. She was a funny lady, a great storyteller. My father was so distant. His only wealth was the fact that he was bilingual. At night, instead of singing lullabies like my mother did, he would show us the different parts of the body in English, like, “This is hand, this is head.” It’s the reason I speak English now, why I speak many languages, why I’m interested in the rest of the world. I’m very, very similar to my father. It’s a bit late to discover that.

My eldest sister passed about 10 years ago. But my younger sister is my agent, she works with me. She likes it because it’s “autofiction” — it’s all true, but the truth is reorganized. My sister likes the twists, the exaggerations. My older brother has always been kind of factual. So he was less enthusiastic about the whole project, which is understandable.

After the “Ring” and Cirque du Soleil pieces, were you conscious of wanting to make a more intimate work?

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I have a strange relationship with these big companies. I’m always lured into doing something really nice and intimate. Once I say yes, of course they want to have a huge Vegas show. I’m not interested in large spectacle. My goal is not to do this big razzmatazz. Sometimes it gets a bit out of hand because it becomes so big that you eventually lose a grip on what it was you were trying to do at the start, so of course I prefer working in a more intimate way.

Do you still believe that Quebec should separate from Canada?

I’m perfectly bilingual. I spend most of my life expressing myself in English, but I’m a French Canadian; I have a different understanding of what English-speaking Canadian culture is. It’s difficult for me to say it’s not my country. So it’s a bit of a paradox. I’d say I’m a lukewarm separatist. I get a lot of flak for that. Separatists say that I’m a wimp.

In “887” you agonize about your obituary. Is this really a worry for you?

No. When you ask what memory is, there’s a lot of concern with memory in the afterlife. I had to bring that into the show.

Well, what would you like your obituary to say?

I hope that they’ll stop saying that I’m a theater artist and say that I was a multidisciplinary artist.

Anything else? Handsome guy? Fun at parties?

I hope they say all of that!

A version of this interview appears in print on March 21, 2017, on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Building Blocks, Reassembled. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe